This Is Me Being Brief
Since I live on the West Coast, I know my Sunday night posts are usually what you see when you check here on Mondays anyway, so the Monday post in some ways is either redundant or it rolls over the Sunday posts, rendering it obsolete while generally offering nothing new as I generally write it a scant 12 hours (sometimes less) later. Also being tired tends to make my sentences run on.

Seriously, why you people keep coming back here will never stop freaking me the fuck out. I am simultaneously mortified and overjoyed.

So in gratitude for your time invested and in deference to last night's posted brilliance, I will keep this one not only short, but thematically topical. What does that mean? More Star Wars. Just for today and very, very briefly, then I'll shut up and go back to making fun of my kids for the rest of the week. Promise.

Here's a quote from George Lucas circa 1989:

"There are four or five scripts for Star Wars, and you can see as you flip through them where certain ideas germinated and how the story developed. There was never a script completed that had the entire story as it exists now. But by the time I finished the first Star Wars, the basic ideas and plots for Empire and Jedi were also done. As the stories unfolded, I would take certain ideas and save them; I'd put them aside in notebooks. As I was writing Star Wars, I kept taking out all the good parts, and I just kept telling myself I would make other movies someday. It was a mind trip I laid on myself to get me through the script. I just kept taking out stuff, and finally with Star Wars I felt I had one little incident that introduced the characters. So for the last six years [1977-1983] I've been trying to get rid of all the ideas I generated and felt so bad about throwing out in the first place."

This is just so you know what I know: the entire prequel story Lucas has undertaken with the express intent of burning off a bunch of shit that wasn't good enough to put in the first three movies.

And there you have your explanation for Jar Jar Binks.

To finish here, I would like to make two completely unrelated points:

1) The handwritten post from the other day was done because I was trying to think of something different to do, but I'm too much of a pussy to audioblog or podcast or whatever it is the kids are calling it these days when you leave incoming answering machine messages instead of written blogposts. It'd be different if I could sing or fart the Greek alphabet, but alas, I cannot. I do play the guitar, but I don't think the Narcissus Scale is calibrated to handle anything of that magnitude. It's cracking under the strain as it is.

2) After finishing a Douglas Adams book, a Terry Pratchett book and another Adams, I have set aside silly-English for scary-German. I have started to read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. I do this for several reasons: a) I've never read Nietzsche even though I minored in philosophy as an undergrad (it required a grand total of four courses to complete, so shut up) b) the class I signed up for in college that was supposed to cover Nietzsche was interrupted by the fact that my professor was attacked by a mountain lion which is absolutely true and will be the subject of a post all on its own some day c) of all the Nietzsche books I picked up at the book store, this was the skinniest and seemed to have the shortest paragraphs d) the only way to truly counter-act the cumulative effects of bunny and ducky and cartoon character bedtime story books is to--every once in a while--clean out the pipes with some bleak, hopeless, impenetrably dark German philosophy if only to remind you that one day you're going to die and then you'll never ever have to read another ducky or bunny book ever again. And that makes me smile.

The side-effect is some short-term elevated levels of haughty pretentiousness and a propensity to smoke a pipe and wear a lot of tweed. The last two are my wife's problem. Watch out for the first one though.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 8.5


Pops
- posted by Pops @ 1:32 PM